His fourth quarter fundraising has crossed the $8.5 million mark, leaving only $3.5 million until the campaign reaches its goal for the quarter.  Obviously, the campaign is ahead of schedule so far, and the December 16 Boston Tea Party-themed fundraiser will likely put him over the top.

Foreign Policy‘s Joshua Keating laments the possible break-up of Belgium:

Belgium may indeed be held together only by “the king, the football team, and a few beers” as would-be prime minister Yves Leterme has said, but I’ll take that over a country held together by race and religion any day. Bonne chance and veel geluk to those working to keep the place together.

Not to be too severe, but I think that what Joshua Keating or any non-Belgian foreign policy observer would “take” or accept should have no bearing on the situation.  Nation-states that have no meaning for their inhabitants are not boons for humanity–they are artificial constructs that the people who live in them regard as injurious to their own interests.  The real point is that whatever Mr. Keating would “take” is completely unrepresentative of what most people, whether in Europe or elsewhere, will actually “take.”  In the end, the break-up of Belgium along ethnic and linguistic lines is a function of democracy and self-government itself.  If a European identity is at odds with these political values, that European identity will receive very little respect among the people.

Now the balance has tipped. Unleashing riot police on demonstrators, leaving dozens in hospital, then declaring a state of emergency, seem an inexplicable overreaction to protests that posed no threat to public order. Blanket bans on demonstrations and on anti-government radio and television are tactics that would raise blushes even in the Kremlin [bold mine-DL].

Mr Saakashvili claims his country was facing a putsch organised by outside provocateurs. Though Georgia has certainly suffered much from Russian mischief-making, he has produced no convincing evidence that it has played a decisive part in recent days. Having cried wolf, he may find it harder to win outside attention when his country faces a genuine threat. ~The Economist

Wow.  When even The Economist criticises Saakashvili this bluntly, you have to know that he has fallen pretty far from grace.  Then again, Saakashvili’s entire foreign policy consisted of little more than yelling in his most shrill voice, “The Russians are coming!  The Russians are coming!”  His latest excuse-making is just more of the same.  That suited Washington well enough since 2003, and apparently still does.  It’s interesting to see that it has been enough to embarrass some of his most vocal Western supporters.

Still, it wouldn’t be The Economist if it didn’t have this:

This is not just about salving Western governments’ wounded feelings. Failure to criticise Mr Saakashvili’s mistakes will undermine the West’s cause throughout the region.  Russians will wonder whether outside support for Georgia in recent years was a cynical bit of Kremlin-bashing and energy politics, rather than good-hearted help for a country yearning for security and freedom.

Gosh, why would anyone have come to that conclusion?

Insanely, The Economist still favours bringing Georgia into NATO at some point.  So, in short, they have learned nothing from the last two weeks of Saakashvili’s misrule.

Reid Wilson at RCP points to polling for the New Mexico Senate race.  According to this poll, which was done for the Udall campaign, in the (likely) event that Tom Udall wins their nomination, he would trounce either Heather Wilson or Steve Pearce (52-36 and 50-33 respectively).  The “good news” for the Republicans is that there seems to be no difference in support for Wilson or Pearce against Udall–they pick up the regular minimum 33-36%, roughly the same percentage of New Mexicans registered as Republicans, but are not competitive with Udall.  Marty Chavez becoming the Dem nominee is the Republicans’ best hope (polling shows him actually losing to Pearce, but with a hefty part of the vote undecided), and this isn’t likely to happen.  The GOP needs a Chavez-Pearce match-up, which is the least likely outcome in the primaries.  A Udall-Pearce competition would basically be over before it began.  Perversely, the GOP needs a candidate who has Wilson’s moderate-to-liberal positions if they are running against Udall, but Wilson is personally disliked by so many New Mexicans (including me) that she is effectively no more competitive than Pearce. 

Some actual good news for the Republicans: the Democratic primary is early next year to aid in Richardson’s futile quest for the vice presidency (he was so awful in last night’s debate that I felt embarrassed to be from the same state), so the Democratic Senate nominee will be known for months before the June 6 Republican primary.  That will allow Pearce to reconsider his Senate run and go back to running for re-election, and this will let Wilson become the nominee.  She can then go down in flames against Udall, while likely House nominee Darren White secures NM-01 for the Republicans.  That is the most likely good outcome for the Republicans next year. 

Udall will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee, and I would have thought that before seeing these striking poll numbers.  Chavez’s failed gubernatorial bid was not so long ago that Democrats have forgotten it, and Udall has the connections with the DSCC and has better access to fundraising.  Udall wasalways going to be the strongest candidate on the Democratic side if he chose to run.  As representative of the Third District, he is naturally quite liberal, but he is also white, which does help him in Albuquerque and in the southeast, and he is Mormon, which makes him more competitive in the northwest around Farmington, which is a fairly heavily Mormon area.  The NRSC may as well write this one off and focus on races that they can conceivably win. 

Update: Earlier polling by American Research shows approximately the same advantage for Udall.  This polling shows Udall’s impressive strength in pulling away a large number of Republicans from the other side: 19% of Republicans go for Udall, while only 10% of Democrats choose Wilson, and the numbers are the same vs. Pearce.  Udall is winning these match-ups 55-38 and 54-37 respectively.  Obviously, it’s early, yes, but these are huge deficits for Republicans to make up in a difficult year.

The Democratic and Republican Parties have become merely opposite wings of the same bird, and it’s the American people who are getting the bird as our elected officials serve their corporate masters and the special interest groups that dominate both parties. ~Lou Dobbs

Can Pat Buchanan sue for copyright infringement over this “wings of the same bird” rip-off?  In the original, it was “two wings the same bird of prey,” which was a much better way of putting it.  It seems, as virtually everyone has alreadynoted, that Dobbs is floating the idea of an independent presidential bid when he says:

I believe the person elected a year from now will be an Independent populist, a man or woman who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites.

And again:

I believe next November’s surprise will be the election of a man or woman of great character, vision and accomplishment, a candidate who has not yet entered the race.

Okay, I guess he really believes it (and he really believes that he has a book that you’d like to buy), but it’s still not clear to me why he believes it.  Yes, foreign policy is a mess, the price of oil is staggering, the dollar is depreciating, people keep making unpleasant comparisons between the current state of the market and the autumn of 1987, and the economy may well be on the verge of recession.  But why should we expect there to be another Ross Perot-like figure leaping into the mix?  I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be a welcome development–it would be.  But I expect that the candidate would have to be quite wealthy and capable of self-financing the entire campaign, and you just don’t have that many billionaires who get worked up about the evils of corporate influence and mass immigration.  There is real support for strong restrictionist and “protectionist” policies out in the country (ground that the Democrats are already partly beginning to occupy on trade), but an independent who made his campaign primarily an anti-corporate, pro-sovereignty and anti-immigration one could not realistically expect a flood of large donations.  Only a Giuliani or McCain nomination on the GOP side could trigger the kind of mass exodus of restrictionist Republican voters that the Independent Populist of Great Character would need to make his candidacy competitive.  He would draw dissatisfied Democratic voters as well, but the core of this kind of independent bid would be Republican and independent restrictionists.  And what would the Independent Populist of Great Character’s foreign policy look like?  If it is deemed too “isolationist” by the great and the good (i.e., if it is sane on Iraq and Iran), he probably loses many of his nationalist, “Jacksonian” voters to the Republican, and if he is too jingoistic he will be even less popular than the Republicans.

P.S.  The scenario imagined by Dobbs’ friends, in which he enters the race after a Bloomberg candidacy starts, is also highly implausible, not least since Bloomberg will almost certainly not be running.  It also makes no sense–why would Dobbs wait until the man with virtually endless financial resources enters the race?  Dobbs would not only be letting Bloomberg steal his thunder, but guarantee that his campaign would be outmatched in resources by not just two established party candidates but by a billionaire as well.    The billionaire meanwhile frames his campaign around pragmatism and problem-solving and pulls away some significant portion of Dobbs’ protest vote (which is what some part of his support would be).     

As Mr. Kelley’s disdain for “so-called moral issues” suggests, the roles he and Ms. Williams play in politics are connected. Since the Reagan era, conservative Christians have grown in prominence as Republican foot soldiers. Voters like Ms. Williams have elevated “values” concerns in a party once associated more with the Chamber of Commerce than the church. “I’m pro-life. Basically, that’s why I’m Republican,” Ms. Williams says [bold mine-DL]. 

She also agrees with Republican criticism of Democrats’ economic policies. “Democrats are all for social programs which raise my taxes,” says Ms. Williams, who lives in a working-class neighborhood. “I’m not working to pay for people to sit at home watching cable all day.” ~The Wall Street Journal

That’s right.  She’s working so that the government can create a prescription drugs boondoggle to benefit pharmaceutical companies.  That’s why it makes sense for her to be a Republican. 

I understand why pro-life voters typically align with the Republicans.  In theory, it makes sense: we pro-lifers vote for you Republicans, and you work to overturn Roe and generally oppose abortion itself (and, by extension, euthanasia and ESCR and so on).  It sounds like a fair deal, until you, the pro-lifers, realise that you never really get very much out of it in all these years.  But what about getting a majority on the Court, someone will ask.  Well, pro-lifers have helped put Republicans in executive power for what will soon be twenty of the last twenty-eight years, during which time these Presidents have nominated seven Supreme Court justices, five of whom are still on the Court today.  There has been a Republican-appointed majority on the Court for most of my lifetime, and most of the Republican appointees came in during the Reagan years or later, and yet Roe is realistically farther away than ever from being overturned than it was fifteen years ago.  The latest two justices made it clear in their confirmation hearings that they accepted Roe as established precedent–and their nominations are supposed to represent the great clout and triumph of pro-life voters!  Someone might point to the various bad choices and disappointments among the nominees in the past (Souter, O’Connor, etc.) and claim that pro-lifers just need to remain patient and gradually build up that anti-Roe majority they have imagined for such a long time. 

Given the record of the last three decades, what makes them think that anything will change in the next administration or the one after that?  The trouble with pro-life voters is that most routinely vote for the GOP, so the latter have no real incentive to keep them interested or give them anything more than symbolism or limited measures designed to keep them just attached enough to retain their loyalty for another cycle.  Someone will say, “Well, that’s politics for you,” but my point would be that pro-life voters need to be much more shrewd in their willingness to withhold support and extract concessions.  Yes, this is politics we’re talking about, which is why pro-lifers should play the game a lot better than they have been doing.  Those who follow the path of Pat Robertson to pay obeisance to Giuliani are declaring to the party, “Please, exploit us for your own advantage!” 

Now maybe pro-life voters have other reasons to be drawn to the GOP, as Ms. Williams does, but the question is whether those other reasons are still real.  There used to be a certain rational method to how the Republican Party operated.  They might play social conservatives for fools and give their causes little more than lip service, but you could generally count on them to be less profligate in (most kinds of) spending, less reckless overseas and good for business.  Now they have virtually none of that going for them and must rely on the idea that they are the pro-life party (which, officially, they are) to remain even remotely competitive.  If they aren’t even all that good on delivering for pro-life voters, what, exactly, is the rationale for voting Republican?

The grimly amusing thing about the WSJ article is that the “affluent voters” who are trending Democratic are doing so partly because of the perception of a social conservative chokehold on the GOP, when whatever real political hold social conservatives may have ever had on the party has rarely been weaker in practical terms than it has been over the last few years.  The party’s embrace of social conservative rhetoric has made it appear as if the GOP is beholden to social conservatives, when it has never been more apparent than in this cycle that almost the exact opposite is true.

But why isn’t the U.S. standing up for Pakistan when we need it most? Is America even listening to us? We are calling them Busharraf now. They are the same man. ~Parveen Aslam

Having Musharraf step down would be the appropriate move.  The fact that this plays into the hands of the cynical Bhutto is unfortunate in some ways.  Even though she is self-serving, she also happens to be right that Musharraf will continue to destabilise and worsen the situation in Pakistan.  The most dangerous thing about Musharraf right now is that he genuinely seems to think that emergency rule is helping combat the forces in western Pakistan, when this is not the case.  As the article says, emergency rule is apparently distracting the government from real security threats by focusing so much attention on domestic political opposition.  That would make this emergency rule doubly foolish, making Pakistan both more vulnerable to internal attacks and less politically stable at the same time.

I have more to say about Pakistan in an upcoming TAC column, so I will leave it there.

If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it [bold mine-DL]. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world. ~Roger Cohen

You know, the South Side has its share of problems, but this is ridiculous.  Obama “gets” the problems of globalisation because he lives on the South Side?  Or does he “get” it because of his ancestry?  Do all people living on the South Side possess such special globalisation-understanding powers? 

Also, what is all this talk about Obama bridging the “violent chasm” between the West and the Islamic world?  How does he do that?  By saying, “I used to live in Indonesia, but by the way, in case you were wondering, I am not and never have been a Muslim”?  Perhaps he bridges the chasm by reminding inattentive foreign audiences that he supported the bombing of Lebanon, has proposed sanctions and divestment schemes aimed at Iran and has vowed to launch strikes on Pakistani territory without that government’s permission.  How’s that bridge looking now? 

The other problem with this talk of Obama as a bridge-builder with the Islamic world is that people might take it rather too seriously and see him as being too close to the Islamic world.  The logic of “only Nixon could go to China” applies here as well.  Someone who is already seen, rightly or wrongly, as personally close to or understanding of the ‘other’ has much more difficulty engaging in the kinds of negotiations or contacts that Obama proposes to have.  This may seem like an absurd aspect of domestic politics, but if Obama’s supporters were interested in his chance at being a viable national candidate they would stop saying these things right now.  Having combated the false reports that he was a Muslim as a child, Obama has also been conflated or associated with two major hate-figures in the American mind, namely Hussein and Bin Laden.  To portray him as the natural bridge-builder with the Islamic world unwittingly reinforces the negative associations that various chain-mailers, bloggers, pundits and candidates have been making.  Above all, it stresses how dissimilar and to some extent unique Obama’s background is for most Americans, which makes for interesting magazine copy and punditry but does very little for a candidate’s electoral prospects.  “Vote for Obama–he’s not like you in so very many ways” is not a winning slogan in a mass democracy.  Identitarianism is one aspect of democracy that is one of its most deplorable features and one of its most basic and unavoidable.  Being able to identify with a candidate is essential, and anything that weakens this hurts the candidate.  Selling a candidate who already has a reputation for being a bit aloof and “above it all” by referring to his ability to understand other parts of the world makes the candidate seem even more removed and distant from the crowd.  (Today’s lesson: democracy typically produces poor leadership for sound foreign policy–which is not to say that Obama’s foreign policy is sound.) 

Michael Ignatieff, never tired of being absurdly wrong about matters outside Canada’s borders, is quoted saying:

Outsiders know it’s your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it’s clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins.

It seems to me that this is a very tricky and potentially politically suicidal line of argument to use if you actually want Obama to win any of the primaries.  When Obama advances this idea, he does it in a smarter way by stressing that “his story” is an “American story.”  Most Americans are souring on certain aspects of globalisation, so what makes anyone think that portraying a candidate as a “globalised leader” is a good idea?  Obviously, Obama is embracing the “nation of immigrants,” “diversity is our strength” rhetoric that we hear all the time, and for a sizeable portion of the population this is an attractive or at least unobjectionable message, but even here he is on potentially treacherous ground. 

What Ignatieff said, and what Cohen is arguing, exposes Obama to a rather fierce backlash if people begin to believe it: having “internationalism in the veins” may imply some kind of hybridity that reduces the person’s connection to his country (this is the “vaguely French” attack against Kerry taken to the nth degree), and simultaneolusly identifies a policy perspective with ‘otherness’, which unwittingly hints that this “internationalism” is not really fully American.  Many of the arguments advanced in Obama’s favour along these lines are rather recklessly identifying in Obama things that I am not sure that he would even say about himself.  Armed with quotes about his being a “globalised leader,” you can just imagine what his opponents would say in a tough general election fight.  Obama’s actual policy positions on immigration, for example, will be hard enough for him to overcome in a general election (should it somehow come to that) without foreign observers taking about how agreeable he is to foreigners.  The attack ads write themselves. Remember Kerry’s ill-fated boast about all of the foreign leaders who supported his election? This does not play well in most parts of America.

Then there was Mexico’s foreign minister, in what I have to assume is an unwitting display of irony:

My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We’ve got female leaders now in Latin America — in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary.

A U.S. leader who “looks the way the world looks” is supposed to have great symbolic resonance.  That’s the other side of Obama-as-international-wonderworker argument.  It is necessarily a superficial and rather insulting thing to say about the rest of the world: you cannot identify with America because we just haven’t elected the right symbolic candidates, and now you can!

There is also the small matter that Obama’s foreign policy, which does stress interdependence to the point of insanity (“the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people”), is one of the craziest, most hubristic and dangerous foreign policies on offer in this election cycle.  If the rest of the world is hoping for Obama to win, maybe they should think again.

Chris Orr points out this Ambinder transcript from Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, in which the executive director of the NRLC lamely explains Fred Thompson’s supposed electability:

But he’s running strong in Nevada and South Carolina.

Oh, well, if he’s running strong in Nevada, let’s just declare him the winner now and save everybody some time and money.  O’Steen, the director, also kept coming back to Thompson’s national poll numbers, but relying on these is a major error.  I think my WWWTW colleague Lydia McGrew has the most convincing explanation for this endorsement:

The obvious, and probably the only, answer is this: Once you are the friend of the folks at NRLC, you are their friend forever.